Those commercials aren't why Americans buy 3-4M pickups every year. Most on TMC insist automotive commercials have virtually no bearing on demand.
Those commercials aren't why Americans are willing to spend $5k more on average for a pickup than a sedan.
Detroit spent years advertising fuel sippers. Demand would spike along with fuel price spikes but otherwise Americans buy very few and demand very low prices for those fuel sippers. That is why 90% of Ford and GM profits are on pickups and full size body on frame SUVs.
Love of larger vehicles is baked into American society at this point. After WW II most of the world found that they could jack up the taxes on gasoline and people would still buy it. The only developed country that is as spread out as the US is Canada and they have almost identical car buying patterns to the US. Australia has a lot of open spaces, but virtually all the population lives in a few large cities. Australia is one of the most urbanized countries on Earth. All European countries are much more tightly packed than the US and all are small compared to North American countries.
As a result of being packed tightly, it's economically feasible to have an extensive passenger rail network with buses running in between. Passenger rail doesn't economically pay off until the population reaches a certain density. Same thing with a lower threshold for bus service. The cores of most US cities are dense enough to run light rail around the city, but the cities are too spread apart in a lot of the US for reasonable intercity passenger rail. The only fast way to get between many US cities is by air, but with the interstate highway system, getting there by car is feasible if you want to take the time.
So Americans desired big cars because gas was dirt cheap and the country is spread out. Long road trips in a small car if you're tall can be literally painful.
Americans swapped out their large sedans for pickups and SUVs starting in the 90s. The truck based vehicles had the advantage of being up higher so visibility was better. Thinking of my immediate neighbors we're the only ones who don't have some kind of truck-like vehicle. Some are smaller, two neighbors have 4Runners (one has one and the other had 2) and one has a small Jeep, but one has a full sized pickup and an SUV, another has a Yukon, and a third has an Explorer and a 4Runner. We have an Impreza and my Model S.
My partner likes small cars. She had a first generation Outback, but thought the newer Outbacks had gotten too big. She might go for a good quality EV that was about the size of the Impreza (and not sold by GM). She's interested in the Model 2 if it ever happens.
But my partner is the exception on the street. I have very long legs so I need a car with good legroom which rules out most smaller cars. My partners Impreza is tolerable for short distances, but we made a long road trip with it once and my back hurt for a week afterwards.
Americans are driving trucks because that's what replaced the large sedan.
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